‘Bury them in fruit jars.’ A gay mass murder and the cover-up that followed

Fifty years after the deadly fire at New Orleans’ Up Stairs Lounge, new perspectives consider the atrocities that occurred after the blaze.

Thirty-two people were killed in the Up Stairs Lounge fire, including members of the Metropolitan Community Church. Photo courtesy of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.

Flames shot through the crowded Up Stairs Lounge as bartender Buddy Rasmussen opened the front door to see who had been ringing the downstairs buzzer. Someone had lit the popular bar’s stairwell carpet on fire, and it burned its way up the wooden stairs into the bar, quickly igniting the lounge’s red wallpaper, curtains, and posters of Burt Reynolds naked on a bearskin rug and Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz wearing his seven gold medals, a star-spangled Speedo, and a smile.

Some patrons saw the blaze and ran for the nearest exits or down the stairwell, emerging with their clothes on fire as neighbors raced to pour pitchers of water onto them. Rasmussen began tapping patrons on the shoulder to follow him toward the fire exit at the back of the bar, but many were too shocked by the exploding blaze to move.

The June 24, 1973, conflagration, likely set by a sex worker ejected from the New Orleans bar earlier that night, killed 32 people and injured at least 15 others.

Yet the reaction to the catastrophe hardly matched the immense suffering the fire caused, and the tragedy was compounded by multiple denials: Public officials refused…

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